He was on the phone with Elaine before the hotel elevator reached the lobby.
"I have a data transfer from Sorokin. Two named principals with verifiable documentation." He described the meeting in three minutes, precise and sequential. When he finished, Elaine was quiet.
"He's offering cooperation," she said.
"In exchange for a framework. He's also giving us a timeline on the supply chain attack — weeks, no specific vendor identified yet."
"The supply chain attack is the more immediate concern," she said. "I'll need the transfer data tonight."
"I'll send it through Marsh as soon as I'm back at the hotel."
"Don't go back to the hotel. I have a car outside the hotel's main entrance — gray Audi, your name on a card." A pause. "I want to debrief you in person. I'm in Geneva."
Marcus stopped walking. "You're here."
"I was here when you walked into that room." Her voice was even. "Did you think I wasn't going to be in the city for this meeting?"
He thought about the operational parameters she had spent two days briefing him on. He thought about the fallback posture. He thought about Elaine, specifically, and the way she moved through risk environments with the methodical care of someone who had been doing it for twenty years.
"Fair," he said.
The gray Audi was where she said it was. She was in the back seat. A second person was driving — someone Marcus hadn't met, who said nothing and whose face he noted and filed. Elaine was dressed for a meeting rather than field work, which was either her normal operating mode or a deliberate choice. He suspected both were true simultaneously.
He handed her the configured phone. She connected it to a tablet she was carrying and ran the transfer. She read the output.
The silence while she read was very specific.
"These are real," she said. "The second name — I know this name from a separate thread. It connects to the real estate channel." She looked up. "This is significant, Marcus."
"I know."
"The cooperation offer — Sorokin's position within the network, the legal exposure, the timeline — I need to bring this to Warren tonight."
"Do that. But Elaine — the attack timeline is the priority. Weeks. A supply chain vector. I need to know if you can get the specific vendor target from any signals access before Sorokin can get it from inside."
She looked at him. "We can try. Give me forty-eight hours on the signals question."
"You have forty-eight hours."
"And Marcus." She held the tablet. "You did something right in that room. You got the data, you got the cooperation offer, and you kept it contained — no commitments, no unilateral agreements." A pause. "Sorokin is a sophisticated operator and you handled him well."
"He's a frightened man," Marcus said. "Frightened people are easier to read than confident ones."
Elaine looked at him. "Yes," she said. "They are."
The car moved through the Geneva streets in the late afternoon light, the lake occasionally visible between buildings, and Marcus thought about supply chain attacks and unnamed principals and the world Varela was building and the world he was building and the distance between them.
He thought it was closing.